Q57 - Ecological Economics: Ecosystem Services; Biodiversity Conservation; Bioeconomics; Industrial EcologyReturn

Almost every landscape fulfils various important functions for human society. Nevertheless, planning does not always allocate individual functions the significance that they ought to receive in comparison with others. A typical example is undervaluing landscape services that cannot be expressed in market terms. However, there are means to correct this imbalance. A landscape's non-market services can be expressed using non-market evaluation methods. As a basis for assessing the importance of multi-functional land use, a systematic overview of the various functions of a landscape is presented here. Furthermore, there is a brief description of the non-market evaluation methods that are suitable for evaluating important non-production landscape functions. The core of this work is a search in three flagship periodicals in the field of environmental economics. There is a review of papers applying non-market valuation methods to landscape services, which gives a firmly based picture of the possibilities for evaluating the non-market services of a landscape, the means most commonly used for this evaluation, the intensity of the work that went into developing them, and the increasing importance and prestige of these methods.